How have Indigenous and other colonialized people created, taken up, critiqued, transformed and resisted technologies, data, and science? From digital games to laboratories, from genetic research to pollution, from statistics to plants, we will discuss the ways land and body sovereignties are at stake in technoscience. We will learn from the growing field of Indigenous science and technology studies that includes historical and other approaches, and then put this field in conversation with works from other decolonial traditions.

Efforts to decolonize museums, universities, and other institutions have been met with confusion, opprobrium, and applause. It is clear that decolonization no longer refers to a historical period or the fate of a nation, but rather a set of ideas, processes, and movements. This course approaches decolonization from the perspective of intellectual history. What did writers argue that decolonization meant; what role have intellectuals and their institutions sought to play in decolonization; and what were the consequences of their efforts? Moreover, how have historians written — or not written — the history of decolonization? This course will focus on historical responses by anti-colonial intellectuals to the end of the British and French empires and the ascendance of an American one. In addition to the study of anti-colonialism and its narration in professional historiography, this course also considers the relevance for historians of recent theoretical debates over decolonization and what is called "decoloniality."

Neoliberalism has been North America's dominant ideological, policy-framework and political,economic, and social reality for the last half-century. Neoliberalism's defining elements — free trade, individualism, market fundamentalism, privatization, deregulation, and a weakening of the state — have profoundly reshaped Canadian and American governance and society since the 1970s, and marked a departure from the Keynesian interventionist approaches that dominated policy and discourse from 1945 until the 1970s. This course seeks to historicize neoliberalism's emergence, its ascendance, and the resistance that this ideology and its policies have engendered from its beginnings in the postwar period to the present, and within a transnational context. The aim of this course is for students to develop their own opinions on just what the impact of neoliberalism has been on life in North America. Students will develop and sharpen these views by critically assessing historical works together, and by individually addressing issues through writing and seminar discussion. It should be emphasized that this is first and foremost a history course, and that all of these activities shall be rooted within the historical discipline.

This course will focus on the theory and practice of oral history. Students will read and analyze scholarly works that utilize oral history interviews, and engage with key debates around issues such as memory, trauma, narrative, and representation. Students will learn how to develop and undertake a project that employs oral history methods, including the processes of interviewing, archiving, and publishing. They will grapple with a range of ethical, political, legal, and other considerations inherent to oral history, and of significance to other fields in the study of history. This course will consider different approaches to oral history, over time and across cultures.

This reading seminar will focus on sexuality in Chinese history. We will engage with theoretical works as well as empirical studies. What is historically specific about sexual identities, sexual acts, and the discourses and technologies of sex in China? How does the concept of "China" itself relate to sexuality? The goal of the course is to provide students with a basic framework for pursuing additional research, as well as for comprehensive field preparations in these areas. This course will be offered as a joint undergraduate/graduate course with HIS485H1 in the 2024-25 academic year.

This seminar responds to the disinformation crisis of the past decade by focusing on the relationship between social media and history in two ways. First, it offers a thematic survey of the much longer histories behind social media platforms, including global histories of computing, mechanization, capitalism, race, gender, and power. Second, it explores how historians could use these newer technologies to generate better public access to quality historical scholarship. So doing, this course seeks to provide future historians with a deeper understanding of how these "modern" platforms are defined by global historical legacies and biases that require our urgent attention. Readings, research, and seminar discussions help students examine these legacies at work within social media platforms themselves, revealing how they are "haunted" by ingrained biases, rooted in longer histories of racism, colonialism, misogyny/ transphobia, and capitalism. Beyond critique, this seminar focuses on whether social media platforms can function as potential tools for historians. Could a stronger understanding of the technologies and histories behind social media help historians protect public digital access to quality history and data that can make a difference? Assignments and workshops blend traditional formats like book reviews and project proposals with newer digital formats, including the production of TikTok and YouTube videos on archival sources that put our readings into action and attempt to make accurate historical information "go viral."

The course introduces students to creative nonfiction writing by combining elements of a traditional graduate seminar and a writing workshop. The aim is to improve historical writing and prepare students to incorporate elements of creative nonfiction into their writing about the past, whether in the form of traditional scholarship, public facing work, or innovative hybrid forms. The course material and assignments will focus on careful reading and critical analysis, as well as, writing exercises, creative experimentation, and an exploration of the possibilities of form, style, and media. In order to enable students to develop greater confidence and a more self-aware engagement with writing as craft, the course will delve into creative nonfiction methods, tools, and techniques. These will relate to the fundamentals of narrative (e.g., characters, scenes, structure, plot) as well as more experimental forms of creative expression. We will read exemplary works by historians as well as engage with other forms of narrative nonfiction, literary essays, fiction, poetry, and documentary film.

Empire has long been considered a crucible in which the sciences of nature were formed. The radically different environments, places, and forms of life that Europeans encountered as they expanded their territorial reach overseas — and the exotic organisms that accompanied returning explorers and collectors to Europe — exploded standard understandings of nature and the world, ushering in new theories, methods, and practices for knowing nature. This course will engage literature on the science of nature since the early modern period, with a particular focus on the 18th and 19th centuries, in the context of European imperial exploration, expansion, and violence. Particular attention will be paid to the roles of indigenous knowers, knowledge systems, theories, and practices in shaping modern understandings and sciences of nature.

More than backdrop to human history, the environment and its constituents — plants, animals, geography and geology — are fundamental forces that contribute to shaping historical events and contouring human societies and cultures. This
course explores both the range of interactions between humans and the natural world over time, and the scholarly approaches to analyzing environmental history, emphasizing the methods, questions, and archival approaches central to environmental historians. Because of the scope of the field, the temporal and geographical span of this course is broad. Near global in spatial focus, this course will draw on studies of Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas, and range from the deep time history of the Earth to the early 21st century.

This course seeks to shift the focus of history away from humans alone onto (non-human) animals (and to human-animal-interactions) and engage with the rich and rapidly expanding field of animal history. Animal histories ask us to imagine a more inclusive past that is not anthropocentric, and instead center and restore nonhuman animals into historical narratives, as subjects, active agents, participants and fellow travelers. In this class, students will examine familiar historical narratives on science, medicine, religion, food, law, disability, empire, and war through the lens of animal history.

This seminar examines photography and photographs in three ways: historically, methodologically, and conceptually. Throughout, we investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might enable us to refuse capitalism's violence — and if so, how?

Historically, the seminar will cover the era of the photographic image, from its invention in the 1830s to the present. We will be especially concerned with examining the role that photography has played in shaping modern understandings of self, nation, and race. In addition to examining relationships between photography, identity, and power, we will develop a set of conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing photographic images, carefully considering the status of photographs as primary sources for historical research. In terms of the conceptual, we will read and discuss foundational works by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and others. Here, we will consider the ethics and politics of human visual experience as such. What does it mean to see and be seen? How has photography been used to separate, identify, and classify? How have photographs changed the kinds of claims that people could make in their respective private and public spheres? Finally, students will consider ways that they might mobilize the visual archive in their own research.

This seminar examines the concept of "modernity" and its expression in visual form and cultural practice. We will focus on developments in visual culture beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to explore a range of transformations in subjective and social experience and economic and cultural practice that scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have described within the rubric of modernity and modernism. By studying both the primary theoretical texts underpinning this concept — including Baudelaire, Marx, Freud, and Benjamin — and key secondary literature, we will attempt to define modernity and capture the nuances of its many competing definitions. We will ground this pursuit in the history of Western visual culture. Key topics will include: technological change (from photography and film to color and printing); the centrality of urban space; theories of vision; ideas about temporality, history, and the archive; emergent practices of collecting and display; travel and colonialism; and consumerism and the mass press. In what ways, we will ask, have changes in visual culture been central to the concept, experience, and origins of modernity? And how does focusing on the visual aspects of modernity help us better understand its broader social, political, economic, scientific, and technological developments?

A recent historiographical shift has opened up the study of mapping, particularly in its imperial functions, not only as an antiquarian fascination but now also as a source of political, social, and intellectual history. This graduate course will examine maps as sites of the construction of identities, of the exercising of power and of performances of violence.

We will look at mapping as an encounter, and as an intrinsically ideological and imaginative process. Each week will focus on a specific set of maps, reading the maps themselves as historical texts and looking at the constructions of space, power, identity, and conflict they engendered. Although taking a global perspective, we will look at four case studies from North America, Africa, India and South East Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, through which we will explore themes of imperialism, nationalism, expressions of sovereignty, territoriality, cartographic literacy, non-cartographic mapping practices, gender and space, counter-mapping, conceptions of self, and wider issues related to geographic imaginations.

This course examines selected topics in Canadian social history from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Students will have an opportunity to study various significant topics where there is a strong secondary literature. The topics are organized chronologically, and an effort will be made to appreciate the significance of social transformations over time. We will focus on the changing approaches and methodologies of historians during the past 30 years. Ultimately, students should gain a better understanding of both Canada's social history and the writing of social history by Canadianists. Likely topics include: the rise of institutions, aboriginal peoples and acculturation in the prairie west; industrialization and the family; working-class cultures; spectacles and the new cultural history; gender and the reform movements; the rise of the welfare state; immigration; consumerism.

This seminar will introduce some of the key topics and classic readings in Canadian history. It is mainly intended to allow PhD students to begin preparation for the Canadian field exam, but it will also provide a general view of work in Canadian history for graduate students. A key aim of the course is to draw students out of their area of thematic or temporal specialization within Canadian history.

This seminar provides a broad regional survey of recent scholarship in Indigenous histories of Turtle Island. Readings for the seminar will feature histories written by or in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and Indigenous communities, with the aim of drawing students into discussion of comparative historiographies, the role of worldview in historical writing and the significant methodological interventions made by Indigenous scholars and Indigenous studies. Students will consider oral history and material culture as sources for writing history, and discuss ethical research practices for community-based scholarship.

In addition to active participation in weekly seminar students, each student will write a major paper, approximately 20 pages in length, in the form of a review essay on the historiography of either a region or a topic.

This course will introduce students to key works and approaches to the study of empire and 'race' in Canadian history. We will discuss the history of migration, the meaning of empire in everyday life, Canada's relations with the global south, and Indigenous politics. Throughout, we will debate the merits of the 'transnational' turn in Canadian history.

This intensive joint graduate/undergraduate research seminar provides opportunity for detailed study of the treaty processes between Indigenous peoples and newcomers in Canadian history, examining the shift from alliance treaties to land surrender agreements during the colonial period through to the signing of recent treaties including the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and the Nisga'a Final Agreement. We will consider the history of Canada as a negotiated place, mapping the changing contexts of these agreements over more than four centuries through readings and seminar discussions. The first six weeks will be devoted to an intensive study of more than four centuries of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and newcomers to the lands that would become the Dominion of Canada. There will be a day-long field trip to the Woodland Cultural Centre and the Mohawk Institute Residential school and a class trip to the Royal Ontario Museum. For the major assignment, students will select a treaty of personal relevance to them and conduct detailed research (guided by the professor), contributing their findings to a web resource on Canada's treaties. Students in this year's Canada By Treaty will have the opportunity to learn about digital curation and website design. Primary source analysis, seminar participation, digital content, research essay.

This course explores how the "transnational turn" has influenced the writing of Canadian history over the past two decades. Students will be introduced to the major debates in the international literature, as well as a range of works in Canadian history that adopt a transnational approach. In weekly readings, seminar discussions, and in the preparation of a major historiographical paper on a topic of their choosing, students will reflect on the challenges and merits of interpreting, researching, and writing Canada's history through a transnational lens.

The course this year will concentrate on the period since 1980-2000. The course will centre around the Mulroney government's foreign relations, including acid rain negotiations, the free trade agreement of 1988, peacekeeping, the South African question, Canada's defence policy, and the end of the Cold War. On some topics primary research materials can be made available.

This course explores the historiographies and historical populations surrounding "the world’s oldest profession" in Canadian and comparative global contexts, from the 17th century onwards. Using a range of texts, students explore both the lived experiences and representations of those involved in this controversial economy, including madams, clients, police, and queer and trans communities. Throughout the course students will examine a range of sex work archives and primary sources, including memoirs, photographs, and film, to develop an original research project on a topic related to the course theme.

This course explores the enduring power and changing forms of "race" in Canada and in the United States from historical and theoretical perspectives. We will examine how "race" has affected society and inequalities within both nations. We will also see how "race" has impacted both nations' engagements with the world. To make our comparison concrete, we will consider connections as well as divergences. To that end, our examination of "race" will focus on tracing interactions among law, society, and policy from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. We will examine these interactions as they affected white, black, indigenous, Asian, Latino, Muslim, and mixed race residents. We also will probe related impacts on transnational and international relations. This is both a reading and research course.

The course will introduce students to the methods and practices of intellectual history with a focus on the development of ideas in Europe from the Enlightenment to the present day. The books assigned in the course will be a combination of classic and exemplary works in the field, theoretical texts in related fields, and some of the best and most representative works recently published in the field. The aim is to give students a solid foundation in the methods and practices of intellectual history, an exposure to a breadth of approaches within the field and a sense of the trends in recent scholarship while also enabling them to engage with challenging theoretical works that will allow them to create their own unique approaches to intellectual history.

Jus commune: the rise and development of learned jurisprudence in the High Middle Ages. Jurisprudence is one of the foundational disciplines in the rise of the Universities and the one in which the newly defined figure of the academic most directly became engaged in the rule and development all sorts of high medieval institutions and practices. This course will examine the texts and practices relate to medieval jurisprudence.

Our medieval history students and those in the Centre, whatever their topics of interest, can all profit from some familiarity with the history of ecclesiastical institutions in the high Middle Ages (papacy, episcopate, parish structures, clerical education etc.). The proposed course would provide the opportunity to acquire such familiarity while varying the topics covered in accordance with the research interests of the students.

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of 20th century east European Communism. A little over three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the east European communist regimes, scholars across the disciplines continue interpreting communism’s multifaceted legacy. Consensus on what exactly constituted state socialism and how to remember it, however, is difficult to achieve. With emphasis on recent historiography, this course highlights the complexities of the communist past. Focusing on a range of issues — such as nostalgia, consumer culture, sexuality, gender, nationalism, dissidence, political violence, and attempts at transitional justice — this course will reveal that, when considered as a lived-experience, it is impossible to represent socialism in a straightforward and unambiguous narrative. Instead, we will explore the various, sometimes conflicting, ways in which people lived in and through the communist regimes and the ways in which they have come to interpret their legacy. This course will combine discussion of scholarly studies with screenings of documentary and fiction films. For their writing assignments students will produce a historiographical survey, a comparative essay on visual and written sources, and a research paper based on both secondary and relevant primary sources. Students will also deliver an in-class presentation and lead discussion.

Up until the twelfth century, a significant proportion of Western medieval sources originated from monasteries. At the same time, many considered monastic life to be the most perfect form of existence. During this seminar, we will try to understand why such was the case, as well as how the monastic ideal evolved from its origin to the twelfth century. We will explore with a critical eye some of the most important monastic primary sources, especially the intriguing hagiographic sources (Lives of saints) and the so-called "normative" sources (rules and customaries). These sources will be read in English translations but students who can read Latin will be encouraged to access the original texts. Thanks to these sources, we will discuss the daily life, internal structures, and interactions with the lay world of the most significant monastic communities of the Middle Ages. This is an introductory course for graduate students desirous to acquire sound bases in the history of medieval monasticism.

A research seminar devoted to the study of social and economic change from the accession of Henry II to the passage of the Statute of Mortmain under Edward I. Subjects of inquiry will depend upon the interests of the class, which among other things may include: 1) social status and responsibility; 2) the means available to obtain, hold and transfer land; 3) the distribution of wealth and the value of property; 4) trade, industry and markets in town and country; 5) the feudal and manorial "familia;" 6) employment opportunities; 7) food production and transportation; 8) record keeping and literacy; 9) technology; 10) family ties; 11) crime and justice. Knowledge of Latin and modern European languages is highly desirable.

Social historians of the past decades have explored new ways of understanding human experience, publishing fascinating new work on sensory history, spatial history, material history, and history of the emotions. They have worked with some earlier social historical methods, like quantification, they have incorporated foundational concerns about class and economics, and they've integrated areas of inquiry that took off in the second half of the 20th century, like the histories of gender, of children and youth, and of race. Early modern historiography has been transformed by the intersections of these approaches, and in this seminar we’ll consider how the new work on sense, space, materials, and emotions may change our approach to the early modern world. We will look at some theoretical or survey works, read some monographs together in depth, and sound out the scope of possibilities through a few essay collections. When we look at different sides of human experience, do we see and interpret the early modern period differently?

This seminar will investigate the central place of humanism in the development of the European Renaissance. Beginning with the emergence of humanism in fourteenth century Italy, the class will investigate the influence of humanist ideas on various aspects of the political, social, and cultural worlds of Renaissance Europe, north and south of the Alps.